The Bees: A Novel

by Laline Paull

  “Which is precisely why you have been chosen. Now come quickly.”

  Sister Ilex led her down the corridor past the Dance Hall and the freight waste depot, to the empty receiving area near the landing board. Then she signaled, and instead of the fertility police that Flora expected, a young sister appeared with a fresh honey cake. Sister Ilex held it up and the smell made Flora ravenous.

  “Before Lily 500’s sentence was carried out, you engaged in a reckless and sentimental exchange with the deceased forager, did you not? And she imparted to you her knowledge?”

  Flora nodded, her attention riveted by the sweet, dense cake.

  “It may still have value. If you can access it, then you are suspended from sanitation duties today, and may instead try to redeem yourself and serve your hive.”

  “With all my heart.”

  Sister Ilex gave Flora the cake, and never had food been so delicious.

  “Rains have blighted our season of plenty and yesterday’s health purge was a drastic protective measure—but if we lose any more foragers to the poison we will not be able to gather sufficient food for the winter. Therefore it has been decided to send out scouts to try to locate all tainted sources in our vicinity. Obviously, because of the risk of death, the lower the kin the better. With Lily 500’s knowledge and your brute strength, you might have some success.”

  Flora finished the cake and the honey brightened her mind. “I am a scout? I can forage?”

  “Restrain your ego, 717. Your kin may never fly, except to carry waste or in sacrifice for the good of the hive.” Sister Ilex led her out onto the dazzling landing board. Thistle sentries saluted.

  “Do not tax your brain, but fly about chaotically as you will. Just go as far as Lily 500’s data permits. If you get lost, so be it. If you draw the Myriad, you face them alone. And if you do manage to return but carry sickness, you will be denied entry—though someone will come out to hear any news you bring.”

  “But if I return healthy and with knowledge, I should go to the Dance Hall.”

  Sister Ilex laughed. “A positive attitude is just what we need, 717. Very good!”

  “Azimuth: the exact degree of the sun. Radius: a section of the perimeter of a circle. North, south, east, west. Distance measured in leagues—” Flora stopped because the sun’s warmth sent her blood pumping into the veins and capillaries of her wings. Her latches sprang open, the four gossamer membranes stretched wide and flight-tight, triggering her thoracic engine. A power surge filled her body, her chest spread broad, and her wings hummed brightness.

  “You will wait for permission!” shouted Sister Ilex above Flora’s thoracic roar. “You will—”

  Flora did not hear the rest. With the slightest press of intention, the air rushed beneath her wings and the apple trees fell away below. She took a strong, high course, and as her antennae automatically adjusted to flight position, she felt a channel open deep within them through which streamed Lily’s knowledge and aerial skills. The hive was a tiny gray square, the orchard a verdant strip between the dull fields and the gray industrial complex—

  Birds. Lily’s caution came to her mind. Storms. Windows. But the scent of nectar carried on the warm, dry air currents rolling high above the land, and Flora joined with them and rode them.

  “Fly about chaotically,” Sister Ilex had said, but Flora 717, lowest kin of the hive, needed no instruction. Beyond the great dull fields of wheat and soy, a vast golden plain of rapeseed radiated in the distance, the oily-sweet smell of its nectar rising warm and seductive on the air. Flora locked onto it and as she flew nearer saw and smelled enough nectar and pollen to fill every chalice in the Fanning Hall, stack the walls of the Treasury with honey, and make bread to fill the hungriest mouths.

  “A flora may not make wax, for she is unclean; nor propolis, for she is clumsy; nor ever may she forage, for she has no taste; but only may she serve her hive by cleaning, and all may command her labor.”

  Determined to prove her worth, Flora began her descent toward a million tiny golden mouths. Each showed a faint ultraviolet line pointing to its well of sweetness, and those florets stirred by her wingbeats murmured in pleasurable anticipation. Countless foragers worked the great golden field, and for the first time in her life, Flora lowered herself onto a willing flower head.

  The stalk held a number of little florets, some of them shy and not quite ready, so Flora climbed around to make her choice. Transparent filaments on the stem caressed her legs, the plant bobbed under her movements as if urging her on—and then she found her first bloom, just that instant perfectly ready.

  As Flora’s tongue unrolled toward the bead of nectar, tiny particles of orange pollen tingled against her fur. The taste of the nectar was so bright and the energy release so sudden that she almost fell off the flower head. Then the aftertaste developed, a deeper musk changing the first sweetness. Flora’s flight had used half the fuel from the honey cake and she was hungry again, so she drank from floret after floret, from stem to stem until she felt her strength return and a satisfying weight of nectar in her crop.

  Flora imagined the faces of the Thistle guards as she returned radiating the sweetness of her forage, and then it occurred to her she could bring pollen as well. If she let the florets brush against her she could comb the orange dust straight into her baskets, but she saw that a forager from another hive had a better way. This more sophisticated sister rolled her pollen into balls and then packed them down into her leg panniers, and soon her last set of legs bulged with orange badges of industry and she flew away.

  Flora thought to copy her effortless style, but found it was very skilled work. She grew frustrated at dropping packages down through the leaves, but only when she decided to fly down to retrieve one did she see the horror beneath them.

  The earth was littered with bodies. Covered in black ants, a bloated mouse stared up with white eyes. Dead sparrows lay between the plant stalks, their beaks open and their tiny tongues dried gray. Between them were dead bees, countless numbers of them, and wasps and flies, their bodies speckled with the pale gray film that had condemned those foragers in her own hive.

  Flora lurched up into the air through the plant stalks. The golden field tilted and swung as she struggled for balance and the earth pulled as if her crop of nectar was tied to a corpse on the ground. Flora’s venom sac swelled tight in her belly and she whirled in the air, firing her alarm glands in all directions, searching for the giant wasp or horde of the Myriad that had killed so many. But she was alone with the sun and the sky and the field of poisoned gold.

  Movement caught her eye. Deep between the flower stalks, there toiled on the ground a glittering black army of ants, dragging the body of a red-tailed Bombini, one of those solitary bumblebees that cruised the orchard and exchanged pleasantries with the sisters of the hive. By the look of her fur she was freshly dead.

  Flora hovered as low as she could and called out in clumsy Hymenopteraese, the old shared tongue, “Speech, Sister?”

  The largest of the ants paused from directing the column’s labor. Her mandibles shone black and strong.

  “Speech, Sister,” she replied in her strange accent.

  Flora struggled to remember the coded tongue from the Queen’s Library.

  “The dead,” she said. “Befell?”

  “Sick rain.”

  “When?”

  The big ant pulsed her antennae. “One . . . sun. ”

  “One day ago?”

  The ant nodded, then returned to her column as it dragged the bumblebee away. Nearby, the black tide rose up over a fallen sparrow.

  Flora had seen enough. If the sick rain was yesterday, then Lily 500 had made no mistake when she danced her coordinates, and the flowers were clean. But now they were poisoned, and she herself had eaten and drunk from them.

  As Flora fired her engine and launched herself into the sky, she felt the effects start in her body. She gained altitude but lost balance, and as her wings began to numb she keele
d wildly from side to side. Her body compass swung in all directions, her antennae hissed with static, and then she lost all scent. Flora fought her way higher to the guiding warmth of the sun, fear pounding in her mind as the nectar in her crop began burning her from within. She searched the air, but all markers for home were gone.

  The golden field shrank down beneath her and her wild, blind ascent threw her into a cold and twisting current that hurled her half a league in what direction she did not know. A great brown crop spread out below and was gone—and then she glimpsed a mass of churning green treetops approaching. Choking and whirling, Flora managed to get to the edge of the fast current and flung herself out. She tumbled down through the leaves, struggling to grab anything she could.

  The leaves were dense and she managed to cling to one. She dragged herself to the node with its twig, feeling poison burning through her crop and beating her antennae with toxins. The trees were sycamores and their sticky, simple smell had something of the high, sexual odor of drone in it. A spasm rose in Flora’s body, but she clung to her leaf stem until it rose to her mouth. She spat repeatedly—but because she had drunk so much in order to return fully loaded to the hive, she knew it would take time to empty herself.

  Flora cursed her greed as she clawed the poisoned pollen from her panniers and hurled it as far as she could. Her intestines burned and her limbs shook as the toxic nectar seeped through her body, weakening her by the second. From longing to forage and leave the hive far behind, now all Flora wanted was the sweet bouquet of home and the warm press of her family around her. Now more sisters would die because she would not be able to get back and warn them of the danger of the field of gold—all her sisters, the babies in the nursery—

  My egg! She had not thought of it since leaping from the landing board, but now she felt it as strongly as if she held it in her arms, its shimmering beauty and radiant force against her body. And feeling such love must surely compound her crime against Holy Mother and her hive. Flora groaned—even when she had the chance to redeem herself, her pride had led her into folly. Better to die cleaning drone cells rather than bring this on her hive.

  Cleaning drone cells. Those filthy, fetid cubicles—Flora’s gut convulsed at the memory—and suddenly she knew what she must do. Securing her grip on the twig, she incited the full taste and feel of that oily fecal waste on her tongue, with its pungent odor of male genitals—

  With a great spasm of her intestine, a jet of poisoned nectar gushed through the air.

  “Holy Mother’s cunt, what was that?!”

  Flora had not imagined the smell of drones. With a roar of anger a battalion of them rose up through the leaves in front of her. One of them cursed and spun around, wiping the poisoned effluvium from his helmet.

  “What reeking princess is this?” he yelled. “Brothers, I leave her to you, for she is the foulest-looking thing I ever saw—”

  “That is no princess,” cried another. “What pestilent sister dares climb up to Congregation? Smite her, someone!”

  “Careful—she makes to spray again!”

  Flora let the last jet of poison fly from her body, and the drones exclaimed in disgust and reared back in the bright air.

  “Forgive me, Your Malenesses.” Flora wiped her mouth. “I was sent out to bring news, but I swallowed poison in the field of gold, so do not go there.”

  “Do not come here either!” It was the large, pale drone whose plume she had defiled. “If there is an uglier sister, then I have never seen one. Linden, by her livery, is she not from your hive? What a poor, ill-favored place it must be!”

  “Then pray do not visit! And forgive the sabotage of your fine looks, but it gives the rest of us a chance.”

  Flora saw that Sir Linden hovered a safe distance from her, and hundreds of drones in different livery hung in the air all around, idly curious about the female intruder. Some of them teased the large, pale drone, and he flew away in anger.

  The breezes stirred the great sycamore boughs and music shimmered from its leaves. Flora looked around in wonder. With her body cleared of the poisoned nectar, she could now draw in the deep, earthy fragrance rising through the bark and feel the life-force of the tree, and see how all around it drones from different hives hung in the air competing to rev their engines louder or tried to outdo each other with displays of aerial prowess.

  “Yes, I think you will live.” Sir Linden settled nearby. “Why are you here? Please tell me you did not follow me. I would be so ashamed—”

  “No! I was sent as a scout—”

  “Yes, well, go back and report that Congregation is exceptionally crowded with large and stupid fellows from better hives than ours, who clearly eat better food, surely served by more comely and well-tempered sisters. You have not been a good advertisement—” Linden stopped short, his attention caught.

  All the drones turned to face the same direction and began roaring and cheering, their chests revving like thunder and lifting them up into the air. A thick, sexual scent billowed from their abdomens and flowed across Flora’s antennae, and with it another scent, strong and intimately female.

  “Today! My princess comes!” Sir Linden pumped his scent glands furiously as he threw himself up to the height of his comrades, and Flora heard the slightly higher timbre of his roar as he joined in the great, growling chord of lust.

  The air churned and the leaves trembled at the approach of the virgin princess. She scythed past the treetops on a blade of air, too fast for capture but slow enough to flaunt her gleaming tawny bands and the luster of her golden fur, a cloud of musky perfume swirling in her wake. The drones threw themselves into a frenzy of aerobatic displays, roaring and posturing and thundering to and fro to draw her attention, and in response she spiraled and plunged, the better to show her long, shapely legs folded under her elegant body, her tiny waist, and her full, regal abdomen that tapered to a pouting golden bud.

  The drones cheered and bellowed out her praise and again the princess shot past them, this time letting her wings murmur of her pleasure in sex, and her command that the drones provide it. Flora caught a glimpse of her beautiful face before a great wave of her royal scent drew music from the leaves and the drones roared off after her in a rage of lust. The air echoed and Flora felt the reverberations go through her body as she watched them disappear into the bright air.

  When the winds dispersed the vivid erotic odor of Congregation, Flora raised her antennae and searched for the hive. The faint thread of the orchard came across the vast, monotonous fields—a long flight into the wind on an empty crop—but Flora knew the lives of her sisters depended on her hard-won knowledge. She raised her wing-power and sped for home.

  Far below her on the dun-brown field, black shapes rose cawing into the air. By the blue-black flash of their wings, Flora knew they were crows—and that they blocked her path to the hive. If she kept her course they would catch her; if she fled too far her fuel-strength would give out. Either way, without her warning, more sisters would die in the field of gold.

  The cawing rose to a higher pitch and Flora knew they saw her.

  Sixteen

  BURNING WITH ADRENALINE FROM EMPTYING HER fuel reserves, Flora flew higher and faster into the headwind. The smell of the crows hit her antennae, and her brain screeched as Lily 500’s hoarse voice cut in.

  Low! she shouted in Flora’s mind. Drop lower!

  As she saw the red eyes and black beaks Flora swerved low and hard beneath the crows, dropping through the air currents toward the smell of the earth and corn. The strobing shadows of the flock passed over her. All except one.

  A sudden downdraft bounced Flora’s body higher in the air as the crow dived for her and snapped its massive beak. It whirled around looking for her, cursing in vexation. Flora rolled and tumbled in the swell from its huge, stinking wings and sped low above the spiking cornstalks. The crow flapped and cawed in excitement as it searched for her, and she did not dare stop.

  Shelter by the edge! came Lily’s
data, but there was no edge; the field was vast as the sky, and all Flora could see were the racing spears of grain that would beat her from the air if she misjudged her level. The wind threw a carrion-footed scent over her like a net, and Flora knew the crow was close and low behind her.

  The edge! The edge! There it was—a low line of green hedging hidden in the moist division of the crops. She fled toward it not knowing what good it would do—and then she saw the bright flutter of other insects above the flowering weeds—flies and gnats and white butterflies spiraling in the sun—

  Use them!

  Flora sped at them, the crow hard behind her. She had one glimpse of the butterflies’ surprised faces and the beautiful bronze tips of their wings before she burst through the crowd of insects, sending them into a whirring panic in the path of the crow. She heard its flapping wings as it thrashed along, snapping up as many as it could catch.

  Flora drove herself high above the hedgerow and spun until she locked onto the scent of the hive. Beneath her the crow cawed in triumph, and she did not need to look to know the butterflies were gone.

  THE ORCHARD WAS A SWEET-SCENTED SIGHT, the little gray square of the hive even dearer as she descended from the turbulent heights down to the landing board.

  “Halt, Sister.” Two Thistle guards came forward as soon as her feet touched the wood. When they had scanned her and could find no trace of the gray film they escorted her to the Dance Hall, where a crowd stood behind a sickle of identical Sage priestesses. She felt their keen attention rove her body and draw deeply on her scent.

  “Your smell has changed.”

  “I had to void myself,” Flora said, “in the field.” As another Sage priestess walked behind her, she felt her antennae begin to throb. It was so unexpected and intimate that for a second Flora did not react. The priestess began pushing the probe of her will into Flora’s mind.

  My egg!

  Flora’s war gland flared at the threat. Without knowing how she did it, she felt her antennae lock so hard that the priestess instantly withdrew her attention.